NAFTA Book Tour

What Good Are Bookstores? (Above: Venn...

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 19:35:00 -0400

What Good Are Bookstores?

(Above: Venn diagram, ”shoppers” and “readers.” Mass-market book-selling on the left; future on the right; “current condition” is in the overlap.) This is a rough version of the talk I gave at the Henry Art Gallery, July 7, 2011, as part of the “Shelf Life” residency set up by Henry Art Gallery designer Jayme Yen for Publication Studio, July 5 - 10.

I love bookstores. I worked in one, I mean as an employee. I’ve also worked in dozens of booktores as a writer, relying on their walls of books to shelter me and help me think. When I was writing The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, I used the University of Washington libraries for research; but the place that helped me actually write was Magus Books, just off Seattle’s University Way. It’s the right size. I don’t know who was doing the buying there, or what criteria they used, but the store’s predilections suited me — sheet music, weird historical and sociological stuff, lots of literature and poetry. I would wander and sit in the stacks and read and think, disappearing into the books. I wrote Nicholas Dee this way. Here’s a scene I wrote specifically about Magus:

“A clutch of little bells rang as I pushed the heavy door open. Warmth came mingling out into the cool evening air to greet me. I stepped inside and stood still for a moment, bathing in it, the sweet decaying smell, old musty books, the hard wooden shelves, an acrid smoky trace of cigars. From off my coat, the freshness of a December storm, the tiny flakes melting, their dampness evaporating into the shop’s still interior. There seemed to be no one else there. ‘Hello,’ I called, singing the word softly. ‘Hello?’ Nothing. No one. ‘Hello,’ I whispered once more. Sweet silence. It would be simple enough to just listen for the tram. I slipped my shoes off, setting them by the radiator, and made my way in to the books.

“I could trace, perhaps, the history of this pleasure. Find its contours and depth, the echoes and sympathies, the shifting repetitions of this moment for me: once, with my father, on a day when the winter cold lay thick in my woolen jacket, my small and tiny fingers held tight in his hard, smooth hand; and I, watching the motion of his long legs, the gabardine trousers moving softly with each step forward along the frozen walk (the empty blue winter sky), could imagine the warm, close air behind his working knees, the small hollow where the trousers hung loosely, holding the heat and odor of his strong legs; and he, looking down at me asking what it was I was thinking then, and would I like to stop for a moment, the small bells ringing as he pushed the heavy door open, the sweet smell of books mingling out into the cold air to greet me. The moment inside the door, the pause upon entering. I feel it closing behind me, its slow progress back, the slip of the latch, and the silent puff of air, the door fit neatly back in its frame.

“I had a little list in my pocket, a scribbled note. Titles I might never find. Boyish fantasies of the intellectual: Bruno, Causabon, Fludd. Older now, too big to be led around by my father. And the hours that passed, my list lost on the floor unnoticed. The drift of my attentions through the windowless interior rooms — the simple etchings of flowers, pistil and stamen enlarged, names of tropical birds, stones of the glacial plateau, the English manor house, methods of instruction in the time of Charlemagne, a chart I once saw and could never again find chronicling bridge disasters, the mint, its history and manufacture, disorders of the brain, furtively and for several hours, Welsh bundling (fearing that any practice with so intimate and blowsy a name must be obscene), maps, of course, islands and river deltas, a boat, once, that sailed over the Angel Falls, a woman’s death by fire, fleeing Paris and the plague, the comparative sweetness of regional waters, the tongue and teeth, a sensitivity to cold, its touch upon the heart, the impossibility of Maxwell’s demon, meaning and song, speech impediments. My legs asleep, the book upon my lap.

“Impossible to judge the time, all light of day lost among the twisting walls of books. My sudden fear that time had come unhinged, whole lives drifted past, my mind having fallen so far. I rose too quickly, older still, a terrible ache in my knees. Difficult to find my balance. The muscles of my legs were still unwinding. A pile of books stood beside me, an accusation. I rubbed the backs of my knees through the warm gabardine and sat down, thinking to select one or two titles with which to appease the owner.”

On the afternoon of my talk it occurred to me that reading this scene would be a great way to frame the question “what good are bookstores?” I was in Seattle, far from my own books, so I went to Magus to get a copy of Nicholas Dee. It wasn’t there! That’s a typical result in the sort of smaller used bookstore I prefer. And not a problem: Google Books has Nicholas Dee, so that evening I used the venue’s wireless and read the passage about bookstores off of Google. Thank goodness neither I nor my publisher, Grove, ever asked Google to restrict the views to “snippets.” Also typical: after finding that Magus didn’t have what I was looking for, I browsed for a while and found Spiro Kostoff’s excellent history of the architecture profession, The Architect. I’d heard about this book, but never seen it, until that day. I spent $10 on The Architect, put it in my bag with my laptop, and walked to the venue to give my talk. It truly is a golden era for books.

But what about bookstores? There’s some worry that the ability to produce books easily, either as eBooks or as print-on-demand (POD) individual copies, will mean that writers will begin to reach readers directly and the role of the bookstore will be compromised, if not completely erased. I believe the opposite — that digital technologies will make the role of the bookstore more clear and viable. But bookstores will never again be big megastores, nor will they offer deep discounts. Something else is emerging, a return to the commerce around books from back before the era of big stores.

Reading is still a solitary activity; writing is still, largely, solitary. But there is a third thing — a social life of literature — that has always been conducted in bookstores, in the commerce between readers and writers, and which is distinct from shopping. Today, as shopping perfects itself in the rapidly triggered and realized exchanges of the iPhone app or in the equally refined consumption machine of, say, the Virgin Megastore, the less efficient, meandering, interminable relationships of literature begin to stand out in stark contrast.

Never before have shoppers been so sophisticated and “on their game” as they are today. No skill has been more rigorously cultivated in more cultures, over the last century, than the skill of shopping. Gone are the inefficient days of the old dottering shop keeper. Gone the aggravating encounters with limited choices. Gone the days of waiting long minutes, if not whole hours, for the satisfaction of one’s precise desires. The smart shopper identifies his desire, puts down the money, and takes home the goods. Better, the satisfaction of this transaction is temporary, and so the shopper quickly returns, having exhausted the value of what he bought, and begins again. By contrast, literature points nowhere, least of all toward a satisfying end. Literature begins to engage and satisfy long before purchase, changes little when it is bought, and, rather than exhausting itself in the moment of purchase, in fact becomes more available, more promiscuous, after it’s been bought and begun changing hands willy nilly throughout the untracked, “non-shopping” matrix of friendships. Literature is indifferent to a sale. So how can bookstores survive if they lose the race for “smart shoppers” and their core role as host to the social life of literature rises to the fore?

What’s a bookstore? It is a store of books.

What’s a book? For our purposes, a book is any reproducible text. Let’s also allow eBooks. An eBook is reproducible. It can be used or not, bought and sold. It can be well-made or poorly-made, a thing that is “stored,” and bookstores should embrace that, rather than repudiating the digital.

What’s a store? A store is a supply or a stockpile, a place with stuff on hand. And, typically in this usage, the stuff is for sale. It was once just a stockpile. Then it was a stockpile in a room with a door and a sign above the door. You walked in and spoke to someone to discover what was available and on what terms, exactly.

In the 1870s, with the creation of the boulevard system in Paris, the first big department stores arose. Storefront windows appeared at the ends of the long vistas of the wide boulevards. Goods were displayed in full view, yet behind plate glass. The relationship of conversation with the shopkeeper was thereby superceded by a primary relationship of desire for the withheld object — the clothing on the mannequin, the books in attractive large piles. (Not coincidentally, this is also the time when kleptomania first appeared as a malady among ladies of the middle and upper classes. Emile Zola’s novel, The Ladies’ Paradise, provides a superb view onto this wholesale change in Parisian society.)

These are very different relationships — the person-to-person conversation leading to exchange, and the person-to-object desire leading to acquisition. Because books are objects and can be designed and produced as desireable commodities, “book stores” were easily seduced into this new set of relationships, putting primary focus on consumer desire for the object, and letting the person-to-person relationships recede and get out of the way of the sale. The end result is the big, discount store, the “big book,” and a primary focus on moving large numbers, not on the culture of reading or literature.

Some unusual challenges for “book-stores”

Literature is not shopping. It is the opposite. Shopping is the completion of a relationship, the satisfaction of a desire (and subsequent need to repeat, since desire never disappears); literature is the start of a relationship that is unpredictable and enduring. Books suck as a commodity — rather than expending themselves with use, they improve with use; older ones get better. And they’re easy to share; they’re use and desirability has a long, unpredictable flow. But books are objects, and so they slip too easily into the consumer relationships of commodity culture. This is a regrettable error. Books are actually the ground of relationships more enduring and valuable than“consumption.” They connect us, again and again; their value comes not in consumption but perpetuation, attentiveness, endurance.

Consumerism is hostile to literary culture, and that is why “smart shoppers” will always drive the best bookstores out of business. “Smart shoppers” have a primary relationship to the object: possessing the object at lowest cost and with least impediment or delay is their goal. Yet the relationships that form the core value of a book, or of the stores that house them, want to endure, to play out unpredictably and inexhaustibly.

While shoppers need to see/find/appehend objects and consume them, before moving on to consume more, newer objects, readers need to live inside books. They are as lonely as writers, unless there is a host, a location, and a strategy for enacting their shared life as a “public.” “Publication” is the milieu where readers meet and become this other, vital thing — a self-identified, self-recognizing public that can make a home and a future for a writer’s work. Publication is the social life of literature, something that bookstores have traditionally housed.

Bookstores and Publication:

Paradoxically, the emergence of digital technologies shifts publication toward a model (in many ways an older model) that favors the enduring role of bookstores in the economy and culture of literature. No longer competetive as shopping emporia, bookstores must again animate, host, and profit from the social life of literature, i.e., “publication.” As they did in the 18^th and 19^th centuries — when operators of printing presses typically opened the fronts of their shops to customers looking to buy books published there — bookstores can again thrive as the site of publication in every sense. Digital reproduction of texts allows even under-capitalized stores to now produce and circulate books onsite, one-at-a-time.

Writers and readers will flock to this third, interstitial thing — publication: the creation of a public — which is the ground on which they become connected and where they fully articulate their connections. Publication is a necessary process for the culture of literature, and it needs a host and a location. Neither writers nor readers should be the host. They are the invited guests. A physical location and a dedicated, talented team is needed to host, strategize, and enable publication. In the 21^st century, that “location” should be digital, material, and social. Becoming the host and enabler of publication means cultivating these capacities equally (digital, material, and social) without prejudice. It means remembering that all of these things can either be done well or poorly. There is such a thing as a great eBook, and a crappy one, just as there are well-made books and poorly-made ones. The host and enabler of publication should first-of-all be invested in relationships, conversations, and not in the swift completion of a monetized transaction. That’s the paradox of publication. How do you monetize the social life of literature? Or should you monetize it at all?

Some practical suggestions:

Bookstores need to cultivate the material, digital, and social realms equally — all of them — always. Coordinate the three and make them blend. Any activity that is happening in one, should also happen in the others: reading, conversation, sales, free sharing, recommendations, hand-selling, book group meetings, etc. All of these should have digital forms as well as social/material ones. (Enable “digital shoplifting?”) The material, social, and digital environments should be coherently linked through simple, consistent design. Maintain a consistent “voice” in all three — don’t default to prepackaged styles that differ from the style of your shop and your culture/concerns (as one is inevitably encouraged to do in the world of free softwares). Make all these environments as pleasurable as possible: host dinners, rather than just readings; keep a pot of coffee on or provide hot water and tea; encourage people to loiter; get drunk at work (my personal favorite); let pleasure be your watchword rather than thrift or efficiency. Hire readers, not sales people. Maintain these same rich “non-shopper” relationships with your staff and others, throughout the culture of your shop.

Value one-to-one relationships above all else. Here’s where eBooks and POD production of books are essential. Here’s where hiring a friend or admired-chef to cook trumps catering. Here’s where putting the musician you admire in the program means so much more than defaulting to a “norm” of talk-only events. Don’t focus on the sale of the book, but on the quality of the conversation. Indulge yourself; enjoy it. Extend it! And be sure the conversation happens in as many ways as possible — person-to-person; on a blog; in a newsletter; on a broadsheet; over dinner…in any way that has meaning for you and is memorable. Whatever you do, do it well. The investment will bring returns. This approach has always suited the world of used books, where each book is (almost) unique and the site of a very narrow, special interest. With POD and digital reproduction of books, it can now also suit the world of new books.

Always focus on reading, not shopping. Never invite people to be “smart shoppers” by offering them discounts or occasional specials. Give them one consistent price. Value your labor and the labor of your workers and ask your customers to value it by paying for it. When you do charge, set a single “tout compris” price for the staging of events; include a copy of the book in the “tout compris” price.

Small or focused is beautiful, but big is still possilble. Powell’s Books, the nation’s largest independent store, famously puts individuals in charge of sections, so they function almost like specialty bookshops; one big store may in fact by one-hundred remarkable small stores all under one roof. Maybe a big store can be organized like a Farmer’s Market, with many individual purveyors gathered under one roof? Become big by organizing a kind of association of autonomous siblings, rather than a hierarchical pyramid of subservient employees.

There are many things a bookstore does, and some of them can be monetized. Where you do choose to monetize (the sale of a book, an eBook, a ticket to an event, enrollment in a class or a series) do it well. Consider using apps or any other one-click method of payment; accept all currencies and methods. Especially where the store brings high quality to the elements of the social life of literature (by hosting sit-down dinners, by bringing in bands or other non-writer talent for events, by selling drinks, etc.), money can change hands and profit the store as the host and enabler of this social life. In a good bookstore monetizing — the “shopping moment” — should be quick, clean, and clear. Be frank about money and be consistent. Always value what you sell highly.

But much of the essential capital for a store, and for the social life of literature, is not money; amd much of that non-money capital disappears when money is the only acceptable token of exchange. Consider giving preferred status, gratis, to core groups of loyal consituents. Swap free entry for labor; give favors where they are earned with non-money investments of passion or labor or networking or any of the other essential elements of a social scene. Money needs to move through this economy, but it will never move alone.

July 6, 2011, Seattle, WA: In many ways my big trip ended on...

Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:40:00 -0400

The Sorrento, with launch dinner on top.

Patricia No made these for dinner...

..and Vladimir Verano made these.

A wedge of familiar faces.

Toasting and listening, all at once.

John Roderick, with his minstrel legs.

Dusk fell, putting me in mind of...

...the Olympic Mountains, to the West.

I read the dirty parts of the book.

Michael Hebb served Mexican candies.

July 6, 2011, Seattle, WA: In many ways my big trip ended on Monday July 4th, when I took off from New York’s JFK and flew home to Portland. I hadn’t seen my kid in two weeks, and it was wonderful to arrive and head home from the airport with him. But one road date remained, and that was in Seattle, my old home town. My mother and brother still live there, so Mikko, my son, came with me, heading for a much-anticipated three days with his cousins. We stayed in the house where I grew up, where my mother and my brother and his children now live.

The launch dinner would be held in the penthouse of The Sorrento, a grand old hotel I had known in the early 1990s when I was a young novelist, recently returned home after ten years away (in New York and Holland). I’d spent some evenings in their bar, The Hunt Club, drinking with two poets. One was my old friend, Jan Wallace, a naturally gifted writer who had stayed in Seattle and wrote ad copy for the Bon Marche department store; the other was Denise Levertov, by then a legendary figure in American letters. Jan was Denise’s secretary. We drank. Denise spoke about whetever concerned her, and we drank some more. Jan was a superb listener. She could comment innocuously at precisely the right moment; whereas my version of listening involved frequent demonstrations of my understanding, usually in the form of anecdotes from my very thin store of experience. Denise waited patiently for me to finish, then went on with whatever concerned her. I thought I must be fascinating, and no one was ever rude enough to disabuse me of that conviction.

The Sorrento was glorious, even when faded, as it was then; but it has grown vibrant since I left, thanks to new owners and, more recently, the arrival of Michael Hebb. Hebb’s Portland restaurant empire collapsed, famously, under the weight of debts that some attributed to such extravagances as having a “writer in residence” (who, no doubt, ate and drank the highly regarded three-restaurant chain out of existence) and he had fled to Seattle where he built a new platform for the kinds of rich sociality he prefers. “The technology of the table,” as Michael calls it, found a wonderful home in the many public rooms of The Sorrento, where Michael initiated such programs as “Night School” and “Chamber v. Chamber,” pairing food, drink, music, and inquiry, often at a common table. Our launch dinner, centered on a conversation between me and musician John Roderick, was to be the next installment of Night School.

In stark contrast to New York’s Brooklyn Grange, the penthouse at the Sorrento was full of familiar faces. My mother and brother were there, alongside dozens of old friends from my many lives in Seattle. High School friends, fellow writers, an artist with whom I’m “in a band” (in quotes because our band is unnamed and has never rehearsed), old bosses, journalists, PS collaborators, plus the PS team from Portland, Patricia No and David Knowles, and their counterparts from Seattle’s Third Place Press, Vladimir Verano and Robert Sindelar.

The sense of homecoming reached its zenith when John Roderick played an opening welcome song, “Home on the Range,” and without hesitation the whole room joined in. My mother even sang the little-known second verse, along with Carlyn Syvanen and Steve Vause, three old Northwest “lefties” who know their folk songs and are not shy about singing. It was the perfect beginning to an evening marked by informality and the absense of any “fourth wall.” I read some scenes from the book and then Michael Hebb brought out the carne, pork and lamb grilled over an open flame and served on platters “in their own juice,” alongside fingerling potatoes and fresh corn. By the time Michael brought out the dessert — ripe doughnut peaches and freakish Mexican candies on sticks — the sun was sinking behind the jagged profile of the Olympic Mountains, visible to the west.

I love the Olympic Mountains. If age or poverty do not intercede to stop me, I’m going to write a novel in which the Olympic Mountains determine everything. I’ve been enchanted by the Olympics since I was a boy. Their abrupt, spectacular beauty; their modesty and compactness; the fact that no white man ever crossed the small range until 1907 and no indigenous tribes had ever presumed to dwell there (at least not in the lofty upper reaches where, according to the Elwah tribe, the dead moved from this world to the next through a hole in the sky). My own interludes living in a small cabin at Lake Dawn and, as a child, hiking the Elwah, the Hoh, and the Duckabush into the interior as far as we could go, laid the groundwork for a stretch of writing that I am determined to take on soon. On this night, as always, the sun over Seattle set into the Olympics; and we saw it from the penthouse of The Sorrento as bottles of tequila were set on the tables beside the peaches and crazy Mexican candies.

John Roderick was a newsstand clerk in my Seattle neighborhood in the 1990s, when I first moved back and began boring Denise Levertov and others with my passionately held, if completely unanchored, views about literature. John was always bemused by whatever I was up to, some of which he observed in the panoply of magazines that moved through Steve’s Broadway News, where he worked. John was also playing music. He had a group called the Bunn Family Players, and then another called Western State Hurricanes, which practiced in the shed behind a literary arts center, Richard Hugo House, where I sometimes taught classes. He was an exceptionally talented song writer, though I didn’t know that then.

John now plays as The Long Winters and he’s well known. In 2009 we ran into each other in Seattle, and he showed me the peculiar narrative he’d composed on Twitter, sending out hundreds of 140-character messages (exactly 140 characters, so that no one could “reTweet” them by adding “RT” to the message) comprising a world of sharply observed anecdotes concerning someone very much like John. It was like a novel, but fractured, episodic, and strangely poetic. John told me he wanted to collect the Tweets as a single book and then erase them from the Internet. And so Publication Studio published one year of John’s Tweets as a book called Electric Aphorisms. That December, he visited Portland with the Canadian singer, Kathleen Edwards, and the three of us staged a conversation over a sit-down dinner, served by Michael Hebb, for an audience of 40 or 50 people. The pleasure of that conversation, which focused on pop songs, Tweets, and literature, convinced me and John we should try another one.

John arrived ready to play cover songs on a grand piano, but the piano was in the other penthouse, as it turned out. He had a ukulele with him, and that sufficed. We talked about the book and my method of writing it. And then John played a cover of the Rolling Stones song “Sway.” Holding up the ukulele, he explained that you can’t force the instrument to do something that it’s not capable of; rather, you have to adapt the song so that the instrument can do its thing and yet still play the song. And then came his sweet, lilting evocation of the famously boozey “Sway.” It was beautiful, and completely a John Roderick song. What he had done was precisely analagous to the challenge I took on, trying to write LeCarré with my “instrument” (my own sentences and voice). I had to adapt the book, just as John adapted “Sway.” I had to turn it into the book that I was capable of writing. And so, by playing it, I transformed LeCarré’s original as completely as if I had written my own book. Which is what cover songs do — create an original out of the impulse to imitate.

(Photos by Aaron Stadler, Patricia No, and Glenn MacGilvra.)

July 2, 2011, New York City (in the evening): Ben Walmer lives...

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 14:56:00 -0400

The Brooklyn Grange Farm is on top.

Carlos Cuestas played beautiful music.

Brian Quinn mixed the drinks.

The pig cooked inside its own box.

We chatted while the evening cooled.

Dusk over Manhattan, nice with drinks.

I met people by eating off their plates.

The pig emerged from its room...

...and Ben made short work of it.

I read, dusk fell, we all ate and drank.

July 2, 2011, New York City (in the evening): Ben Walmer lives in Northwest New Jersey, in the agricultural countryside known as the Highlands. He is an architect whose interest in building design rests partly in a preoccupation with the structure and patterns of sociality. A house or a building can shape society within its walls. But so can a table and the food laid upon it. Ben, already a food-lover who cares about the sources and substance of what he eats, began to design tables and then meals and then he started to cook them. Now he runs the Highlands Dinner Club, a peripatetic assemblage of available parts that becomes the site of conversation and common cause wherever Ben decides to lay the table. In the past few years he’s cooked and served dinner in empty lots in Harlem, farm fields in the Highlands, and the streets of Manhattan, among many other places. I had never heard of him until June 15 when my friend Michael Hebb stepped in to help me fill a gap in a series of ambitious plans I’d made for dinners in Hudson, NY, and New York City.

“Matthew meet Ben,” the email read. Within an hour I had a chef and an excited collaborator. Ben posseses what I call a “can-do attitude,” the most potent form of capital I’ve ever encountered. Has anyone ever measured the economic impact of optimism or trust? The most moneyed societies can be crippled by the niggardly distrust of strangers or risk. Conversely, the cash-poor economies in which I typically function are vibrantly enriched by the simple presence of a default “yes.” I’ll never forget my first collaboration with Michael Hebb, the genius maker-of-tables and erstwhile restaurateur, into whose posh North Portland, OR, gastropub, The Gotham Tavern, I had wandered one lovely March day. Eating one of chef Tommy Habetz’s exquisite frisee salads, I said to Michael, co-owner and founder of the joint, “you need a writer-in-residence at this restaurant. Let me eat and drink all I want and I’ll do that for you.” And he said “I don’t know what that means, but let’s find out.” He said “yes.” From there sprang a project called “the back room,” and scores of dinners and new work from artists and writers, including Gore Vidal, Mary Gaitskill, Sutapa Biswas, Gregory Crewdson, Dodie Bellamy, Walid Raad, Anne Focke, and many more, all of which followed from Michael’s simple “yes.” And now Michael had delivered me to Ben Walmer and the Highlands Dinner Club.

The day I met Ben, the Hudson dinner I wanted him to cook fell apart. He weathered this sudden change in plans and listened sympathetically to my complaints about the lack of any chef for New York City. Last year Ben built a table in the middle of a one-acre rooftop farm in New York, an unusual place called The Brooklyn Grange. It’s actually in Long Island City, in Queens, but the Brooklyn Grange floats a verdant farm on the roof of a six-story industrial building, covering a full acre of Long Island City’s densely-built terrain. The sun sets over the Manhattan skyline, immediately to the West. When Ben and I hooked up and he heard what Publication Studio was doing, he said we should have our New York meal there, and we did.

I had spent most of the sultry July 2 afternoon wandering the West Village with a small troupe of bibliophiles who wanted to review the recent, sometimes-sad, history of bookstores by touring a few sites with me. Around 6 pm we concluded our tour and took the “R” train to Queens. Navigating the almost-empty sidewalks we found the Brooklyn Grange and took the elevator up to a small doorway that opened onto the farm. The soil of the Brooklyn Grange is less than two-feet deep and the crops are modest — lettuce, arugula, herbs, pole beans, cauliflower, broccoli; but the sight of one-acre of verdantly productive farmland on top of a Long Island City industrial building was just as stunning and transformative as it sounds. Walking through the sixth-floor door into the neatly tended rows of greens, was like walking into a vision of the future. Why can’t the food we eat be grown and cultivated within walking distance of where we eat it? Here was a vivid, irrefutable field of plenty, full of food we would be eating that night.

Ben had shaped his menu around the rooftop farm and around my book. His meal would be the meeting place of the two. When we arrived, Ben’s friend was extending the table with lengths of bamboo, twined into place one-at-a-time, adding room for six or seven more diners. Brian Quinn was mixing drinks on a small TV-tray at the West end of the farm. In the elevator on the way up, I’d met Carlos Cuestas, carrying his guitar, which he played for us before and after dinner.

All of the guests, save three, were strangers to me. This was very unusual, especially in a city where I’d lived for eight years. No matter what the outreach, almost every dinner I host begins with a core group of friends and family, intimates who have been looking forward to something special, and are happy to support my work with something less tedious or plain than attending another reading. Maybe it was the holiday weekend, or the fractured path leading up to the event, but the crowd around the table were an unfamiliar motley of strangers — lively, unrestrained, and further animated by Brian Quinn’s superb Palomas, Cuba Libres, and Honeydew cocktails. Most had come in pairs or groups; few of them had read my work before, or ever sat down at a table this size, let alone found a hand-made book on their plates. This many strangers at a single table is ideal for publication. It was possible to know no one going in and to come out with layered, enduring bonds. At the very least we all left with the same food in our bellies, the same stories in our heads, and the same book in hand.

Including the book in our tout compris pricing is an essential strategy for Publication Studio. The single ticket makes payment for the labor of writers and book-makers a given — a natural thing that no one is invited to question or negotiate. And so (while also offering hundreds of free events) Publication Studio regularly invites people into rich, convivial settings, like the NAFTA dinners, where a single tout compris ticket price effectively isolates the “consumer moment.” Having paid, we all cross the threshold into the event shorn of consumer habits or obligations. Everything is taken care of, and there’s is plenty of it. There’s nothing left to buy. Given the ubiquitous pressures of consumer choice and “smart shopping” this sort of deliberate isolation of a non-shopping social space — a fence thrown up to keep the pressures of shopping at bay — is needed.

Many observe these fundamental pressures and argue for more radical change. Money itself is criticized as alienating, and its hegemony as the token of our exchanges is displaced by “time banks,” “local currencies,” or systems of barter. I ardently do not want that kind of change. I want money for my work. I want it without question, as a matter of human rights. Where there is no money, I want barter and fair exchange. But where there is any money involved, I don’t want fake dollars. I want to be paid for my work.

By contrast, my attempt to isolate certain social spaces from money — or, more accurately, to make rich spaces of interaction that are free of shopping — is a tactic anchored specifically in literature and what I understand as publication. Literature is diminished by shopping. The greatest potentials within a literary text — its ability to embed its strangeness and reach deep into the synapses of a mind that cannot then pull the self apart from what has entered it; its permanent confounding of the division between what is ours and what is shared — gets compromised or eaten away at by the corrosive gaze of the “smart shopper.” The smart shopper approaches a book, looking for legible signs of its value. He tries to calculate its worth and gauge its potential impact. The interaction is succesful if he accurately assesses what he’s buying, and then finds a way to pay as little as possible for it. He wants to have without giving. This is the opposite of literature.

It is no wonder that bookstores are in crisis. The attempt to make books function as attractive commodities, to move vast acres of them at discount prices, to convince smart shoppers of their value, is doomed. Never have shoppers been smarter than they are now. And no low-down dirty trickster of a literary book is going to fool them. Yet literature is essential. It and the public that it shapes will only thrive if we strategize and sustain other relationships — not shopping, but reading; exchanging; understanding — and create the social space to host them. Ben Walmer’s table on the rooftop farm was such a space.

The pictures tell a better story than I can. Talk was loud, constant, filled with bursts of laughter and decorated with Carlos Cuestas’s lovely guitar playing. I drank. I had no plate, so I circulated around the table as guests offered me tastes and bites, empeñadas, tamales, and pig. The pleasure of standing on my chair near dusk and reading as loudly as possible to carry the words of my book across the great length of the table and into the night was considerable. We discussed NAFTA, money, and labor…all the subjects I’ve spent time on here. I can assure you, without any doubt or hesitation, that the next time Ben Walmer or Brian Quinn (our bartender) sets a table, it should not be missed.

The menu: Brooklyn Grange Farm greens dressed with chive blossom vinaigrette; vegetable empanadas w/ mole and queso cotija; ceviche with grilled shrimp; whole roasted suckling pig (set whole at table center); polenta/huitlacoche tamales; chipotle/coffee braised shoulder of lamb with fresh currants served on flatbread with mint/citrus salsa; various condiments (Brooklyn Grange radishes; pickled mustard greens; Brooklyn Grange cauliflower and broccoli leaf curtido; pickled garlic scapes; salsas; local sheeps milk yogurt sauce; grilled jersey sweet corn with chili powder); flan with fresh local raspberries. Drinks: Honeysuckle cocktail (tequila reposado, lime, honey); micheladas (light beer, with lime, worchestershire sauce, cholula sauce, Maggi); Palomas (tequila Blanco, fresh grapefruit, lime, agave syrup, soda); Cuba Libres (151 rum, fresh lime, simple syrup, Mexican Coke); Sancerre white wine, Sommet Doré 2009; Bordeaux red wine, Ch. La Grolet, Côtes du Bourg 2008; Mexican red wine, L.A. Cetto, Nebbiolo 2005 from Baja Sur; El Presidente and Negro Modelo beers; Corralejo reposado tequila after.

(btw, these photos are mostly by Tae Won Yu, which is why they’re so good.)

Last I saw of NYC, July 4th, dusk. We flew west and I watched...

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 14:49:27 -0400

Last I saw of NYC, July 4th, dusk. We flew west and I watched fireworks across the whole country, from 35,000 feet.

Last night I gave my talk, “What good are...

Fri, 08 Jul 2011 12:32:46 -0400

Last night I gave my talk, “What good are bookstores?” at the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle. Wonderful people, and a wonderful crowd. I’ll post the talk itself as a penultimate entry in the blog, following the New York City dinner and Seattle dinner posts. Those will be in place by the end of day Monday. Meanwhile, enjoy another song from Wednesday night’s sit-down dinner. John Roderick and his magical ukulele covering “Sway,” by The Rolling Stones.

7/6/2011 The Sorrento Hotel, Seattle, WA — John Roderick covers...

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 11:55:37 -0400

7/6/2011 The Sorrento Hotel, Seattle, WA — John Roderick covers ZZ Top, “Gimme All Your Lovin’,” on ukulele (partial…the puzzling third verse). More soon.

July 2, 2011, New York City: Sam and Louis dropped me off at the...

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 14:56:00 -0400

Shadows on sidewalk by Wendell's.

The old Phoenix Bookshop, closed.

Matthew's reading at Phoenix Bookshop.

Bob Wilson in the old Phoenix.

Matthew's reading at Eighth Street Books

The old Eighth Street Bookshop

July 2, 2011, New York City: Sam and Louis dropped me off at the old HQ of Nest Magazine, an Upper East Side apartment that is also the home of Nest founder, Joseph Holtzman, and his boyfriend, writer and translator Carl Skoggard. While two dates remained (Seattle and Portland), the New York dinner — to be served al fresco on a one-acre rooftop farm in Long Island City — was the culmination of a very long trip. The next day I would relax with Carl and the day after that fly home to see my family in Portland, for the first time in two weeks. I was very, very happy to be in New York.

I moved to New York as a punk rock musician in 1981 and left it in 1988 as a writer. Everything about the city enabled this transformation, especially the milieu of gay writers I fell into when I took a job at Wendell’s Book & Card Shop on West 12^th Street and Hudson Avenue. Despite massive economic and surface change, downtown, and especially the West Village, still vibrate with deep meanings for me. I met many of my best friends there in 1980s, principally the three people with whom I shared a sprawling illegal loft in the Meat Market district: Larry Rinder, (he appears in my earlier San Francisco posts); Marianne Weems (a theater director, founder of The Builders Association); and Coco McPherson (a very talented actress and writer). In that time, I also came to understand how the things I cared about, politics and culture, could be thoroughly addressed through writing.

We’d had a tough time getting the pieces in place for a NY dinner. The weekend was a bad one (4^th of July), and the chefs who interested us were either out of town or too expensive to set a seat-price we could live with. Knowing that New York mattered to me, I went ahead and listed an event there without knowing what it would be, and as the first inquiries came in I decided to promise a reading/walking tour of some now-disappeared bookstores. It was the writer Matt Briggs’s idea. When PS published his second novel, The Strong Man, Matt planned a series of readings on the sidewalks in front of some of Seattle’s many closed bookshops. These would be announced as regular readings and attended by whomever showed up. Matt had done a similar series in Baltimore, when he was a student at Johns Hopkins.

For my reading/walking tour I picked some shops that had meant a lot to me when I turned from musician to writer back in the 1980s. The first was Wendell’s. Wendell’s was a corner bookstore and magazine, card, and gift store. It took up a tiny storefront that is now a micro-branch of Chase Bank, on the SE corner of West 12^th and 9^th Avenue. I was hired because I kept pestering them and was given an irregular shift standing at the front counter where we kept a baseball bat hidden, to use as a threat against suspected shoplifters. Wendell instructed us to “look at their shoes” if we were uncertain about a customer’s integrity. I didn’t know exactly what to look for, so I never reached for the bat. I just sold books and a lot of magazines to a rotating panorama of regulars that included an editor and writer named Patrick Merla.

Patrick, who had been Edmund White’s secretary for many years, was then the editor of the New York Native, a pioneering gay/lesbian weekly newspaper that beat the drum early for serious attention to be paid to a then-emerging health crisis among gay man: AIDS. Larry Kramer’s early activism as well as Australian writer Dennis Altman’s important work all got into print in The Native. As a bright-enough young punk rock musician working in a corner bookstore, I told Patrick (who regularly flirted with me, despite his errant conviction that I was straight) that I really ought to be a writer — could he suggest some best next steps? He suggested the only right next step — write — and said he’d be happy to read it. And so I wrote an essay about gay masculinity and the world of hard core punk rock, particularly a narrow band of it called “straight edge.” Patrick liked the essay and gave it to his friend Tom Steele who published it in a magazine called Christopher Street (“the gay New Yorker,” Tom always explained), where he was the editor. Patrick hired me to write for The Native.

I met a lot of writers at Wendell’s, some as customers who enjoyed the casual corner store, even though we rarely stocked any of their books (we mostly carried mass-market paperbacks and magazines), and some in print. A magazine called Straight To Hell, Boyd McDonald’s legendary series of sex reports, was written by an amazing cast of characters, including Boyd himself and many younger gay writers whose books I would later find and treasure. STH is what we read at the front counter during the many idle hours we spent failing to spot shoplifters.

Wendell’s was like a small town post office or a corner drugstore. Books were not what made it special. But it showed me how the casual socializing of a neighborhood store plays a part in the day-to-day life of literary culture. As with any other social set, writers and readers need the happenstance of accidental meetings and casual conversations, and Wendell’s provided that, opening a door to me that led from an interest in writing to real opportunities.

Our reading/walking tour began at Wendell’s at four in the afternoon on a hot, humid Saturday. The Chase Bank branch was closed. Four of us stood on the sidewalk, trying to find shade, and I read a scene from La Cucaracha about pop music and its power to create bonds between strangers. In this scene, Carl Silas has just gotten into the car of two strangers and the music on their stereo is known to him, an old favorite. “Carl marveled at the flimsiness of time and geography, how such seemingly definitive separations could be powerless in the face of a common place, like music. Could blood or soil or history ever create a bond as powerful as music? The three of them had never met before, and might never cross paths again, but here they were, together.”

A series of disasters and good fortune had avalanched down on me in the wake of my decision to offer the reading/walking tour. In the course of two days I had to cancel a planned dinner in Hudson, NY, dream up a table and meal to follow the tour in New York City, and coordinate a growing list of interested parties who wanted to attend. My good friend, Michael Hebb, introduced me to Ben Walmer, an architect and chef who runs the Highlands Dinner Club, in Northeastern New Jersey. That was the good fortune. By the time I arrived in New York, Ben had assembled all of the parts for an incredible meal to be served al fresco in the middle of a one-acre rooftop farm in New York’s Long Island City, at a place called the Brooklyn Grange. 42 people signed up for dinner, and all were given the option of joining the reading/walking tour for the few hours leading up to it. Only four did; but, as it turned out, four was the perfect number.

From Wendell’s our small group walked fifteen or so blocks to 22 Jones Street, the former address of the Phoenix Bookshop. The Phoenix, much smaller than Wendell’s, was run by a man named Bob Wilson. Bob knew every book in the shop, intimately. I ended up there because Larry Rinder and I had found the work of Guy Davenport. The now-deceased American essayist and story writer published a short story, “O Gadjo Niglo,” that dazzled us with its easy eroticism and smarts, and Larry and I began to pursue all things Guy Davenport. Davenport was an astonishingly broad-minded and omniverous scholar. In the course of reading one of his stories you could compile a substantial reading list of other texts and artists that must be studied and learned; the lists from his stories led us to The Phoenix. In a small front room, Bob Wilson seemed to have every book Davenport had referred to in the many fictions and essays we’d read. Davenport was an Ezra Pound acolyte, and it was clear that Bob Wilson was too; both their lists stemmed from the decisive opinions of the American modernist who wrote Kulture and The ABCs of Reading, among many other pedagogical texts.

At The Phoenix Bookshop I learned to treasure a small number of great books. I wanted to possess them all. I made my first indulgent purchase — $20 for a rare Four Seas edition of Gertrude Stein’s Operas and Plays, a price that now stikes me as Bob Wilson’s gift to an impoverished young book store clerk. As we approached 22 Jones Street in the sultry July afternoon I saw that the small glass storefront was thick with advertisements for dry cleaning and other laundry services. Ah, well. RIP Phoenix Bookshop. On the sidewalk in front of the shop I read the opening scene of my book to the group and passersby before we moved on to the corner of MacDougall and West 8^th Street, where the great ghostly site of Ted and Eli Wilentz’s old Eighth Street Bookshop stood.

I call it “ghostly” because the Eighth Street Bookshop was not important to me as an actual repository of books. It was important as the prototypical “great book store” that was now gone. A potent and essential node of meaning, the “disappeared legendary bookshop” (like its myrad cousins, those legions of disappeared greats that inspire us while also dwarfing the value of what we have in life) offers fertile ground for imagining what literary culture can be. It’s gauzy images and rich collapsing of tedious real-time into a string of pearl-like, singular moments help us shape ideals that we then pursue in life. The Eighth Street Bookshop was an inspiring place that I visited on trips to New York while still in college. It was always difficult to find; I was usually distracted as friends led me there, so that when I moved to New York, getting my first job at Wendell’s, I kept in my head the image of this other, great bookstore that was always nearby, but which I simply could not find my way to again. And here it was, gone!

It had been gone all along. The Eighth Street Bookshop closed its doors in 1979, and so the shuttered three-story building we found at the corner of MacDougal and West Eighth was the perfect backdrop to my reading of a troubling dinner scene when Carl Silas is humiliated by his host, Eric Fielding. “No hard feelings…when in fact, now there were only feelings, and every one of them as hard as stones, neatly hung around Carl’s neck. They put him right back where he’d been for so long, weighed down, sunk into a dark, inarticulate place.” The holiday weekend had emptied the city sufficiently to bring a measure of quiet and solitude to our street corner. Even as people passed and traffic coursed by in bursts, the interludes of silence let me read quietly and with the kind of indulgence and nuance that’s more typical of bedtime reading. I was very glad our group was four, a mix of friends and strangers who were immediately linked, intimate to one another, and bonded by our time together.

Scale is everything. Throughout this tour I’ve been forcefully reminded over and over of the importance of flexibility and scale. Neither big nor small will suffice; one must always transit between the two. The economies that matter to me — the transactions that allow a culture of writing to pay for itself — happen in the transit between big and small. They happen when a bookstore clerk knows a customer over many months or years and in a mundane conversation mentions the Spanish mystery writer he’s found in the remainder pile of a nearby megastore. They happen when a dinner table of friends and strangers start talking about the places where they’ve traveled. Conversely they happen when huge systems, such as Twitter or Facebook, connect communities in Sao Paolo and Tblisi who both need the same information, whether practical or literary. Or when a musician like Phil Elverum spends three months traveling through twenty countries with a suitcase full of CDs, books, and records. The transit between big and small connects the most intimate scale to the broadest reach, and it is a mistake to regard either one as the starting place for getting to “the goal” of the other. Small systems do not exist as embryo versions of bigger ones. Nor do big systems sit at the top of evolutionary chains from start-up-chimp through growing venture-capital-ape to full-fledged-human global company. All scales function at once. Local groups are global, simply by living in a time of globalism. Multi-national corporations comprise, at the same time, a thousand local relationships, which are the essential stuff of their days.

Publication Studio, with its multiple siblings, has the advantage of enacting every scale with ease at any time. Flexible, nimble movement across the scales of small to big and back again, is the essential tool for a new economy of publishing. The most accommodating site for this flexibility is the dinner table, preferably a single table of 40 – 50 people. At such a table we find the richest interactions between big and small, public and private, strangers and friends. And we have the advantage of thousands of years of history that establish the table as a space of our commonality, a bridge that at once connects us and holds us apart.

Ben Walmer’s long, rough table for 45 set in the middle of the Brooklyn Grange rooftop farm was perfect. I’ll post about the dinner separately, so I can give it some space and have room for more photos. It was a marvelous night; I can’t wait for another one. (And I won’t wait long, actually; in seven hours Michael Hebb opens the doors to tonight’s sit-down dinner at The Sorrento Hotel in Seattle. A New York dinner report, and then a Seattle report are forthcoming in the next few days.)

July 1, 2011, North Adams, MA: I left Toronto at six in the...

Tue, 05 Jul 2011 11:40:00 -0400

Sam Gould co-runs PS MRCC.

His son Louis is very bright.

Jim Voorhies was Sam's host at MoCA.

PS MRCC made a two-volume LA CUC!

This is Bartelby's Tavern.

Sam introduces me.

People stayed and drank until midnight.

July 1, 2011, North Adams, MA: I left Toronto at six in the morning, bound for Syracuse, NY, on a Greyhound bus, probably the worst possible way to cross a national border. We were an unhappy lot, crowded onto the bus by handlers already tired of dealing with the mess of boarding. 20 or 30 people who held tickets were left standing in the bus station as we pulled away; apparently Greyhound had oversold the seats. I slept by the window as the day grew bright outside. The border was unpleasant. A guard stopped the line at one point, yelling “I’ve got radiation, I’ve got a hot one here, radiation,” which no one explained to us. We were just told to “freeze,” and we stood in line with the radioactive(?) passenger, waiting until other guards arrived to resolve the situation. A false alarm, as it turned out. The line shuffled forward for more grim questioning and random inspections until everyone was unceremoniously loaded back onto the bus and we sped into the USA.

In Syracuse my old friend Sam Gould, co-creator (with Mike Wolf) of Publication Studio’s “Midwest Radical Culture Corridor” sibling, fetched me in a big white van full of good cheer, great snacks, and his charming three-year old son, Louis. Windows open to the warm July day, we drove East on I-80 and arrived in North Adams, MA, an hour before the event at MASS MoCA (the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art). Sam has worked for many years as Red76, a shifting arts collective that typically engages non-artists in activities ranging from talk to handicraft to cooking and eating, to karaoke, to compiling and printing journals. Recently Sam’s focus has been on commerce, how it frames or enables the exchange of ideas. For example, taverns. At MASS MoCA he created a temporary tavern, more of a beer garden really, called Bartelby’s, where a guest artist or writer (this day, me) would sling beer and discuss his or her work, with the proceeds of beer sales going to pay the guest. He also set up the Publication Studio equipment onsite. Throughout the summer Sam and two volunteer helpers from nearby Bennington College will produce new books.

The result is convivial and straightforward, a lot like a tavern where the proprietor is a thinking man and profits don’t matter much. Sam’s work has always looked a lot like regular life. He opened a used clothes store in Portland, OR, but every item of clothing was tagged with a story; and you had to swap to get the clothes. He ran a restaurant, but each day’s menu was made up of whatever foods the customers brought in to cook and share. On karaoke nights in bars around Portland he would show up with lyric sheets for protest songs and “host” Protest Karaoke, a kind of symbiotic, thematic gathering embedded within the existing, unthemed karaoke night.

Sam’s work is important because it rigorously insists on a kind of flattened terrain of authority. One of his most beautiful projects was to make cardboard traffic signs, written in Sharpie, exactly the size, shape, and instruction of existing traffic signs. He went around Portland taping his signs over the real ones. Perfect. After initiating their activities, Sam and Red76 quickly, deliberately withdraw from the center of attention to become participants, coequal with others. At Protest Karaoke Sam handed out lyric sheets, then everyone signed up to sing as they could. Sam signed up too. At the restaurant Sam cooked the food he brought and helped where he could. If someone showed up with nothing they still got to eat. Sam isn’t bossy. And he’s genuinely interested in other people, more so than he is in proving a point.

I wrote about this pattern of work several years ago, reviewing Sam’s project, “Ghost Town,” in Artforum Magazine. I described it as “refusing any notions of depth or hierarchy,” and instead “spreading out across an unpatterned horizontal plain,” much like sprawl in the exploding cities of North America. Reaching always horizontally — neither up to appeal to any higher arbiter nor down to touch a dependent “audience” — this work produces “a particular political space quite unlike those which we arrive at through digging deeper or through struggle.” Red76 evacuates depth by becoming dauntingly present on the surface. “This strange effect — in which old hierarchies of meaning (hallmarks of modernism such as irony, repression, revelation, and subtext) are rendered nonsensical — marked every interaction” in “Ghost Town.” The waning of the center and indifference to its authority is an aspect of this horizontality, and cousin to the easy habits of improvisation I’ve, rightly or wrongly, associated with the West Coast.

It’s interesting that Sam, who is light years ahead of most of us in his articulation of these new, decentered relationships, felt he had to leave Portland in order to really pursue his work. He lives in Minneapolis now (notably home to railroad and timber money that came from cutting the forests of Oregon and Washington; the fortune that founded the Walker Art Center, for example) and is employed by institutions in Boston and Portland, ME. There was no job for him in Portland, OR, and no institution to frame what he’s done or shine a light on it. My feeling is that Sam’s unique ability to truly flatten the terrain of authority plays a part in the difficulty institutions have supporting him. He doesn’t brand his work suficiently, nor shout loud enough to win the imprimature of a nervous or uncertain institution. That might be a good move artistically, but it’s a significant handicap for career.

These tensions are at play everywhere. Every city has a center (or several); every city draws lines, so that wherever we live we can choose to position ourselves “inside” or “outside.” And in every city centrifugal forces have been tearing those lines apart for centuries, opening up ruptures in the hierarchical order of things that expose fertile ground for innovations, dynamic “places” located neither inside nor outside. These innovations grow and knit into new patterns, drawing new lines, defining new centers. And so it goes. As Michael Maranda reminded me in an email shortly after my last post, “us Canadians are all alike, despite the differences between TO and Vancouver.”

The event at Bartelby’s began as the evening cooled. The beer garden sits beside a concrete-embanked river, under the dappled shade of leafy trees, next to the vast industrial buildings that have been repurposed as MASS MoCA. Sam spoke about economies of exchange, asking us to pay attention to what we give and what we get. He explained Publication Studio as a kind of direct and transparent arena of exchange. Someone makes a book for you and you pay her for her labor. There is no print run of books made for a phantom public; no seduction of shoppers to move fallow piles of books out of warehouses and into consumer hands. There is only one book, made because someone asks for it, sold to that person by the book-maker. Publishing degree zero.

Whatever the landscape — old financial capital or young exploding city — transparent, direct relationships like these scale our exchanges small enough to let everyone play and improvise with confidence. While I can’t get a restaurant to grill a pig I slaughter over barrels of fire in their back garden, I can get my neighbor to do so. I might not get Random House to publish the novel I know my sister needs; but Publication Studio will do it. Sam has long been a master of returning politics and commerce back to this radically enabling “degree zero,” the people at a table — it’s just us sitting at this table here, now; we can do anything we all agree to do, with the means available.

Interesting to note (amidst all my speculations about East and West) that when this consumate improvisor, Sam Gould, brought his sit-down meal proposal to the keepers of Bartelby’s at MASS MoCA he was told “sorry, no food.” There are rules, sensible ones of course, and nothing Sam could say would change them. And yet, without MASS MoCA, we would never have been in the beer garden with Sam.

June 29, 2011, Toronto, Ontario: Flying from Vancouver to...

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 12:06:00 -0400

Toronto in convo with Vancouver, "W"

Toronto: Neat!

Book Bakery Fund Fair raised $6K.

It was all about chillaxin'

Derek McCormack and Alana Wilcox preach.

In the Book Bakery, Derek and Michael.

Derek McCormack post-its the future.

A Mexi-themed food fest at Micah's.

Neil Brochu made the superb carne.

Micah Lexier's deck party, perfect!

June 29, 2011, Toronto, Ontario: Flying from Vancouver to Toronto, I crossed as great a cultural divide as any I had encountered on this trip. Consider: Portland to San Francisco; San Francisco to Dallas (a fairly big leap); Dallas to Mexico City; Mexico City to Guanajuato (also big, but obscure to me); Mexico City to Los Angeles; Los Angeles to Vancouver; and now Vancouver to Toronto. This last flight took me from the scattered dynamism of the North American West into the long-inscribed vortex of a colonial economy, a network centered on powerful cities whose financial holdings organized the supply regions that fed them for many centuries. Like magnets, these banking centers, among them Toronto and New York, delineated the migrations of rich and poor, of money, labor, and raw materials, inscribing concentric rings of influence around themselves, a target-like hierarchy that still lingers like welts on a disintegrating landscape.

Money has moved of course, shifting addresses, fleeing to peripheries, and pooling just as definitively in West Coast cities such as, first, San Francisco and, later, Vancouver and Los Angeles. But in Vancouver the peripatetic appetites of 21^st century capital erupt in elaborate, scattered developments across a topsy-turvy landscape where finance speaks many languages and can never settle on a single address. Toronto is profoundly international and restless too; but the layout of the city, its well-worn grid and clattering subway, evince a nostalgia for the center, a tacit knowledge of the distance that separates what matters from what does not. Toronto is still a city of discernment that knows the correct name and address of “the best.” Disembarking from YYZ’s wireless-equipped airport bus to board a clang-clanging streetcar you trace a line into the heart of the city, thrown back into the concentric hierarchies of the North American East.

The differences can easily be overstated, and I’ve probably done so already. But some things struck me in Toronto. One was the pleasure of being recognized. The employees of a bookshop recognized me; and then a crowd of strangers at an event treated me as if they did. This kind of thing happens in many cities; but in Toronto, as in New York or Paris, the act of recognition — of knowing what matters and what does not — is delivered with an ease and certainty that makes it seem only natural. Anchored in the centuries-old concentric circles targeting the city, this confident drawing of lines is carried out with an understated grace that contrasts sharply with the enthusiastic hyperbole I regularly encounter in smaller, younger, or more peripheral places. In younger, less-central cities, the volume sometimes gets turned up to overcome a background hum of uncertainty.

A second, companion difference that struck me was how difficult it was to improvise. Anywhere there is an agreed-upon best or right way there are also a thousand wrong ways. The impact of this kind of strength of discernment was revealed in an interesting pattern. I had proposed sit-down dinners — that is, dinners improvised by friends and strangers outside of restaurants through an assembly of available parts — in all twelve cities. At the end of the day, we had improvised sit-down dinners in every West Coast city I visited (Vancouver, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Portland) but in only one non-West Coast city (New York). Every other place indeed turned up remarkable publics, and remarkable, inventive settings and events. But in all of them, myriad barriers, all minor-seeming yet all of them insurmountable, kept us from setting the big common table I had initially proposed.

My Toronto host, Derek McCormick, had performed a kind of miracle on my first night there, mounting a literary “Fund Fair” that put cheap carnival games into the main room of an old community center. The event raised nearly $6000 for Toronto’s Publication Studio, the Book Bakery, with hillbilly music, carny-style hectoring, a raffle, a bean-bag toss, an “authors kissing booth,” and a huge bakesale.

Derek would be exceptional in any city, but in Toronto he is recognized and known for it. He is a uniquely talented writer who meddles brilliantly with the design and presentation of the work that matters to him, whether staging live events or packaging the stories he writes. An early story of his, about the great country singer, Hank Williams, came in a sewing kit for a cowboy shirt, with a pattern for the shirt Williams wears in the story. Derek has offered courses via a fake correspondence school for which he designed letterhead and logos. One of his stories was published as a series of bulk-mail “advertisements” sent from a make-believe Halloween store.

It was not surprising, back in September 2009, when Derek showed up in Portland during the first weeks that Patricia No and I were discovering how to use our new machines. He immediately saw the advantages the PS approach offered him for working directly on books with writers he admires. Publication Studio Toronto was the very first sibling to be hatched, back in 2009. It incubated for nearly a year-and-a-half (during which time the Berkeley and Vancouver studios got up and running) before making its first books in a coffeeshop basement in April of 2011. Interestingly, while those West Coast siblings leapt swiftly from impulse to actuality, like drunks jumping from a motel balcony into a tiny swimming pool, Derek proceeded methodically. He assembled a team of collaborators (Alana Wilcox, also of Coach House Press, and Michael Maranda, who designs and assembles all of the books), applied for grants, shaped relationships with writers, and commissioned the design of logos and letterhead, putting everything in place so that the Book Bakery’s opening could be legible and could matter. He succeeded, in style, and Toronto recognizes that success.

Looking at Derek’s remarkable work, and the deeper history of innovation in Toronto publishing, I must admit that improvisation there is not “difficult” so much as it is simply the work of complete geniuses — innovators who are shaped, rather than squelched, by the city’s deeply inscribed history of discernment and intitutionalization. The city’s rigidness makes Derek’s improvisations matter, and helps insure their longevity.

At Derek’s Fund Fair I spoke briefly about Publication Studio and read from my novel. I was not assigned to the kissing booth, a relief for all of us, I’m sure. The Book Bakery edition of Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha is a refined and understated beauty, reminding me more than anything else of the Brazilian edition of my novel The Sex Offender — an elegant cover stock and high-end paper, with an understated cover that is mostly text (plus a single,small, colorful cockroach). Michael Maranda, who designs and produces all the Book Bakery books, told me about the ecologically-responsible Canadian paper company that makes this marvelous paper. If possible, we’ll begin stocking it in Portland too.

I stayed a second day in Toronto to read at a more private party that Derek had organized, a cocktail and carne en su jugo reception in the home of Micah Lexier. Micah, an artist and curator, has a remarkable collection of contemporary art and a lovely deck out back under the feathery shade of a chestnut tree. It was a warm summer evening. Raccoons frolicked in the under-structure of the deck. A pleasantly drunk crowd of a few dozen writers and artists downed white and red sangrias, tequila, icey cold beers, and the remarkable carne en su jugo, made by Derek’s good friend, a curator named Neil Brochu. This was an authentic carne en su jugo in the Jaliscan style — a soup of beans and meat rich with beefy broth. We dipped warm corn tortillas into the rich jugo and ate with our hands.

Dusk was sublime and the hot day cooled just enough to make the deck into a small paradise, lively with drink and conversation. By the time Derek introduced me, around 9:30 pm, the party was rich with liquor, laughter, and conviviality. Reading out loud was pure pleasure. People smiled and listened, and I think Derek sold every book Michael had made. It was easy, because all the hard work had been done before hand, over the many years of Derek’s presence in Toronto. People came because they cared; they trusted Derek’s good taste, and Micah’s too.

As a way to connect writers to smart readers who will make a difference for the book — and as a commercial activity — this casual gathering among friends was as or more effective than any bookstore event I’ve been a part of. I wonder if the same impact can be had in the younger, scattered cities, cities without the history as a cultural capital we find in Toronto, New York, Paris, London? Probably it can and does happen. At its core, Micah’s party was closest kin to the dozens of Seattle garage parties of my youth, the kind where I played music for drunk friends. Those mattered too, though it seemed impossible to tell, to gauge their impact. There may ultimately be no sharp lines dividing these close cousins, only degrees of gray. The punk garage improvisations and the wonderful night on Micah Lexier’s deck may simply have been two instances of the very same cultural animal.

Look at those books. I am so lucky. It’s still raining and...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 11:59:00 -0400

Look at those books. I am so lucky. It’s still raining and I’m exhausted. I’m going to the Tenth Street Sauna and Russian Baths. Expect reports on Toronto, North Adams, and New York to post by the end of day tomorrow, July 4. Meanwhile, enjoy the thunderstorm.

Thunderstorms in New York City, the last day of my big trip....

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 11:25:33 -0400

Thunderstorms in New York City, the last day of my big trip. Today I’m writing reports on Toronto, North Adams, and last night’s memorable al fresco feast at the Brooklyn Grange Farm. Tomorrow I fly to Portland. One big dinner left, with John Roderick on Wednesday, July 6, at The Sorrento Hotel in Seattle, my old home. A few seats available here. That one’s going to be pure pleasure. I’m bringing my son, Mikko, and seeing lots of old friends. It will be grand.

NYC, July 2, al fresco in the Brooklyn Grange Farm, details...

Sun, 03 Jul 2011 09:03:51 -0400

NYC, July 2, al fresco in the Brooklyn Grange Farm, details posting later today.

People have opinions about the Publication Studio covers. Jank...

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 23:35:00 -0400

One book, five editions.

Portland's Jank Editions.

Toronto's Book Bakery.

Vancouver, BC's Bookmachine.

Berkeley's Allone, Co.

PS PDX and Seattle's Third Place Press.

People have opinions about the Publication Studio covers. Jank Editions started out plain — file-folder covers, rubber-stamped. But Publication Studio has grown into six studios, and everyone’s making books in many ways. On my tour I’ve now seen five different editions of Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha, from Portland (Jank Editions), Toronto (Book Bakery), Vancouver (Bookmachine), Berkeley (Allone Co.), and Portland/Seattle (the PSEBM cover is designed by PS Portland’s David Knowles and the book is made by Third Place Press and Vladimir Verano). See all our covers by browsing our store. I got these at the NAFTA Tour dinners. Some seats still left for dinners in New York City and in Seattle. Tickets here.

June 28, 2011, Vancouver, BC. In Mexico City I had found...

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 15:57:00 -0400

Not the Dunlevy Snackbar, but near it.

The tables were lovely at the Dunlevy.

Keith Higgins made the beautiful books.

Hey, there's me!

The people were also lovely and loud.

Nick Krgovich was the loudest, and best!

Norman had a great time, as did we all.

June 28, 2011, Vancouver, BC. In Mexico City I had found Corralejo reposado tequila for $18/liter, less than half the price I pay in Portland, and I brought three bottles of it across the border into LA. Miraculously, 2 ½ bottles survived that dinner and I packed them into my luggage and flew them across a second border, into Canada. My first “full-NAFTA” liquor. Landing on a wonderfully cool, gray afternoon I took the light rail to Yale Town to meet writer, Aaron Peck. Aaron’s beautiful Letters to the Pacific has recently morphed into a fuller collaborative art book with the photographer Christopher Williams and Johannes Bendzulla joining his first collaborators, Adam Harrison and Dominic Osterried. Williams contributed original tipped-in plates and Bendzulla a series of hand-markings to a limited edition of 36 copies, which is now available from Publication Studio. They launched the book with a four-city tour in Germany, from which Aaron had recently returned.

Keith Higgins and Kathy Slade, who run Publication Studio Vancouver, were out and about, fetching PAs and cases of wine, wrapping copies of the book that Keith had made over the previous week, and stepping on rusty nails. Poor Keith had to stop by the doctor for a tetanus shot just before dinner. They keep the Studio’s machines in a three-story artists building in East Vancouver, a warren of studios that is the busy crossing-place of a remarkable community, mostly visual artists, many of them interested in the work of PS.

Locating production inside the artists’ building, PS Vancouver usually goes offsite to host events, as they did for the launch dinner at Dunlevy Snack Bar, which is in downtown. The Dunlevy is a perfect hole-in-the-wall, deep and narrow. In order to fit the 45 guests for our launch dinner, owner Theo Lloyd-Kohls turned his two-tops into a single long table by the counter and two more long tables across the front. Giant white flowers erupted from vases every few feet, and the books laid on each plate were wrapped in white twine. The easy formality and refined details of the setting matched the sartorial style of the crowd, at once very effortless and precise. My Vancouver friends like clothes and they are particular about them without being fussy or snobbish. The room presented an entirely different picture than the motley garden party of LA or the improvised theatricality of the San Francisco dinner. Nick Krgovich, the greatest crooner of our time, was there to play some songs.

Vancouver has mattered to me for a very long time. It was the first city where I saw how vibrant and deliberate the public life of writing could be. I started going there regularly and working there whenever I could in the early 1990s, principally because of my friendship with the writer Lisa Robertson. Thanks to institutions like the artist-run centers, among them Artspeak and the Western Front, contentious and engaged schools and universities, and vital counter-institutions like the Kooteney School of Writing, Vancouver had an incredibly articulate and visible public life around the work of poets, art critics, and some prose writers. Lisa was regularly commissioned to write in response to the work of her friends and colleagues, mostly artists. The resulting poems and essays were published well and taken seriously; they were talked about, even if in a small community. Lisa became the writer she is because of this unusual public armature, this framework within which the task of writing was everyone’s business. I envied that, and took part in it however I could. Most of my efforts to build infrastructure for writers in Seattle and then in Portland have simply tried to give us, and myself, some of the tools that Lisa had in Vancouver.

Speaking to the long tables at the Dunlevy Snackbar I saw the whole panorama that had made itself available to Lisa, and to so many others — attentive, serious, engaged. There were her peers, of course; artists like Kelly Wood and Kathy Slade, writers like Michael Turner. There, too, were the people who helped make the opportunities that Lisa and her peers fed on, the milieu in which they grew: the writer and critic John O’Brian; artists Ian Wallace, Mina Totino, and Stan Douglas; Lorna Brown, a crucial figure not only as an early director of Artspeak, but as a colleague and artist whose work scrambles the divisions I’ve laid down here. And at the same tables, younger writers like Aaron Peck, whose work has been shaped, in part, by Lisa and her milieu. Very few cities can set a table like this, granting an engaged, serious public to writers when they need it, which is always. But Vancouver does it all the time. These people pay attention to their colleagues up and down the various divisions of age and style, and they show up, in mind as well as body. I felt very lucky to have my work matter enough to be on the plates, and to know that across the breadth of this enduring, self-organized community, my work would be considered and given its due.

Needless to say I was happy and drunk. I read at the start of the meal, graciously accepting the head of the suckling pig from our chef, Alex, and chose to give the second cheek to Keith Higgins and John O’Brian. Keith gave a marvelous toast to the whole room, praising the contentious and inconclusive history of this highly social group, as I went from table to table and chatted and drank. When the dessert came out I stood up on a bench and we talked about my work. I recall talking a lot about music and economics. There was some hope and optimism that books made and circulated this way might matter to people. I insisted that it could be profitable. In Portland we already employ three people. The method of covering a novel was discussed and someone suggested covering stories from the Bible, which we realized is done with great success everyday. This “cover novel” thing is really as old as the hills. It’s just that we’ve come up with a new metaphor. Nick Krgovich sang five beautiful songs, two of them covers, as we passed the Corralejo around, drinking tequila with our fresh slices of rhubarb pie. Ian Wallace bought multiple copies of Nick’s CD. Typical Vancouver.

Vancouver, BC. Awesome. A full post is coming later today, but...

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:15:00 -0400

Vancouver, BC. Awesome. A full post is coming later today, but right now here is Nick Krgovich covering British folk dude John Martyn while we all drank Corralejo reposado and ate pie. Amazing.

June 27, 2011, Los Angeles: Sergio Pastor is sporting a casual...

Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:27:00 -0400

Damien organizes all the work.

Sergio makes the programs.

He used colorful file-folder pieces.

The tables were set in the garden.

Dodie Bellamy reads the buddhist.

The table was very lively

Lively at both ends!

Gus, in the dark, I swear.

Lizzie Fitch did the decorating.

June 27, 2011, Los Angeles: Sergio Pastor is sporting a casual mullet these days, loose long dark hair all around, cut short above his eyes. He still looks imposingly intellectual, especially when his glasses slip down his nose and he peers out over them. He and Lizzie Fitch, the sculptor and video artist who collaborates with Ryan Trecartin, are starting Publication Studio’s new Los Angeles outpost. They’ve located it in the garage of the sprawling, derelict mansion they share with Trecartin in the hills of the Los Feliz neighborhood, almost bordering on Griffith Park. The house is a rabbit-warren of strangely outfitted rooms, most of them shooting sets for Lizzie’s and Ryan’s work, with a lovely garden patio where we held the sit-down dinner launch event for their Studio and my novel.

Colleen French, whom I’d worked with in Portland, Ore., where she started her Renegade Dinner Club, cooked the meal, part of a series she’s initiated in Los Angeles, where she now lives. Colleen stocked the meat juices of carne en su jugo with all sorts of fresh fruits and spices. This main dish was the richest, most complexly flavorful rendition I’ve had since Leif Hedendal’s birria de chivo got my tour started in San Francisco. Colleen’s carne was not goat, but pig. Rich, smokey, and delicious.

Sergio, Lizzie, and I spent the day fiddling with paper for the dinner menus, video clips of wrestlers, and Pandora channels of music that might grace the lovely outdoor setting. The tables were motley: one big wooden one, three silvery chrome ones, a glass-top table, and a big round garden table capping off the end of the bending line we shaped them into for the feast. Michael Hebb, of One Pot, and his awesome helper Nick showed up a few hours early and made the tables pretty.

Los Angeles was an exciting stop because the focus was on the new Studio and on our special guest, my interlocutor, Dodie Bellamy. I’ve loved Dodie’s work for 20 years, since I first read her astonishing novel, The Letters of Mina Harker. I remember reading The Letters the way some people read the newspaper, voraciously, hungry for all the news. I had no idea that so much could be touched on in the course of a sentence, and so effortlessly. Every organ of my body was being addressed. The Letters shattered any illusions I had about the limits of fiction and authorship. They redefined authority. Dodie’s work weds language to living so that the accumulation of words on the page becomes like some great expanding other organ of the body that heaves and breathes.

Thanks to Colter Jacobsen, who runs the Studio in Berkeley, Dodie published her new book, the buddhist with us, working closely with Colter and designer Wayne Smith to bring the book out this last May.

The theme of the evening — why are we together? — sprang from the delightful pairing of Dodie and me. Our works mine entirely different territories and potentials in literature, yet we have found common cause through two decades. What links us is not always evident on the surface. Here are the opening lines of both books. Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha: “The city fills a great bowl in the steep Sierra Madre, the meeting place of three river canyons that the Chichimeca Indians called ‘the place of the frogs.’ There were frogs here, and Chichimeca, for centuries before the arrival of Spanish armies. Today the only frogs are on tee-shirts and the shelves of ticky-tack tourist stands. The Chichimeca have been bred away or simply disappeared into the immensity of the surrounding Mexican countryside.” And the buddhist: “I’m curling back on my spine, ass up in the air, cunt pointed towards the ceiling, and he’s plunging into me. We never set eyes on one another until yesterday, yet here we are, a middle-aged woman and a middle-aged Buddhist grunting together in the Kabuki Hotel. How did this happen? The internet, of course.”

Why are we together? The question extended beyond this central pairing to the whole group that assembled at Sergio and Lizzie’s derelict mansion. Tim Ferriss, award-winning author of The Four-Hour Work Week, sat across from Joshua Leibner, a veteran English teacher at LA’s inner city Carson High School, in conversation with film-director Gus Van Sant, and historian of photography Katie Henninger. Why are we together? Our books and the invitation to share them over a dinner and conversation triggered this self-assembly. The affinities that connect us through books were evident in the enthusiasm and volubility of the table.

Dodie’s work catalyzed everything. New to most at the dinner, her chronicle of a complex, months-long affair with “the buddhist” became the centerpiece of our discussion about serious writing and the voices that can be animated there.

When the main courses were done and bottles of Corralejo reposado tequila came out, Michael smartly asked everyone to move from the garden into the house, to reconvene within one of the crazy shooting sets that Lizzie had assembled for a video with Ryan. There we sprawled on low beds, setees, and couches hoisted to near ceiling height in a sort of surreal assemblage of domestic parts, mostly from Ikea, that became a frame for our conversation. Gus Van Sant talked about his version of “Psycho,” which he said was an attempt to copy Hitchcock’s original exactly. He made a shooting script that replicated every shot in the original. “It became interesting,” he told us, “mostly because it failed, it had to fail. Everything about Hitchcock made ‘Psycho’ what it was, especially his Catholicism. Mine was a kind of Protestant ‘Psycho.’” A frightening thought indeed. This result accorded with my experience taking the structure of John Le Carré’s A Murder of Quality and writing my own book directly from that “shooting script.” In both cases, what is interesting — what the piece of work could ultimately mean — arises from the failure of the artist, Gus with “Psycho,” me with Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha, to get it right.

Dodie talked about Bob Gluck’s approach to composing his novel, Margery Kempe, and its titular narrator, an early-15^th century woman credited with writing the first autobiography. To get closer to Margery’s account of her own feelings, and especially of her own body, Bob asked others, including Dodie, to write about their bodies and what they felt in different circumstances, sexual and otherwise. He used all of this material in his book, marbeled amongst his own prose without demarcation (but with credit to friends in his afterword). The LA writer and artist Matias Viegener, also in attendance, recalled Bob asking him to write about his body’s sensations as a child. The text is a pastiche of many writers, Bob primarily, and the composition is all Bob’s. Dodie herself pastiched the work of friends into The Letters of Mina Harker, which were Dodie’s actual letters to actual friends, and, in some cases, their responses. And in the buddhist she used a blog as the site of composition for most of the work, developing and shaping the story amidst the push and pull of her friends’ comments and feedback. Why are we together? In some cases, just to get our work done. Writing is never done entirely alone, and certainly books are never completed alone. They must be read, and talked about.

Publication Studio Los Angeles is at 2240 Hillhurst Avenue, in...

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 19:28:26 -0400

Unconventional chandelier in the entry.

Mail gets sorted here.

Lizzie works in the dance room.

These people like good books.

Lizzie and Sergio in the arts HQ.

Ryan's intern get a nice desk.

Lizzie tends bar.

The Studio will operate in here.

Damien keeps everyone working.

The patio, site of tonight's dinner.

Publication Studio Los Angeles is at 2240 Hillhurst Avenue, in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Artists Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin live here with writer Sergio Pastor. Sergio and Lizzie will run the Studio in their garage. Tonight is the launch event, a sit-down dinner with authors Dodie Bellamy and Matthew Stadler, who is also a PS co-founder. It’s an amazing building, a kind of low-class mansion that was derelict, but which the trio have fixed up nicely. A very few seats are still available tonight, click here.

June 25, 2011, Guanajuato, Mexico: I wrote Chloe Jarren’s La...

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 03:29:00 -0400

Our books were captive at Fort FedEx.

Free at last! Spirited away to GTO.

Six hours on the highway. Lovely!

Guanajuato looked familiar.

The dogs still rule the rooftops of GTO.

Matthew was happy back at La Carterra.

The chicken was less happy but delicious

Grant mans the books at La Dama.

And after the event, pulque with Dean.

June 25, 2011, Guanajuato, Mexico: I wrote Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha in 2008 while living with my family in Guanajuato, Mexico. We moved there for a year to get away from the United States. I had arrived with a very difficult and ambitious book to write, a “big idea” that had been making me miserable for many months. But in Guanajuato I would have no cell phone, no car, no appointments, no friends or obligations, only my family and the book. We rented a lovely small house in the densely-packed center of the city and each morning I walked my son to school and then returned home to write. A month or so into the year I was still miserable and making very little progress on the book.

I enjoy research, especially when writing is going poorly. So, typically, one morning I went into town to do some “research” and instead spent the day reading an old John Le Carré mystery that I had loved many years before, when I read it at a beach. It was delightful. Brisk, light, and compelling, A Murder of Quality was set in the closed society of a small Devonshire town where a storied old “public school” dominated life. Reading it I thought, “I don’t want to write a ‘difficult’ book; I want to write something like this book.”

The next day I “scored” A Murder of Quality, sketching its structure precisely on a big sheet of paper, noting the actions of each character, the pace and sequence of each scene, creating a detailed map that was very much like the score for a symphony. Then, for the next five or six months, I “played the score” by writing my own book, following these notations precisely. The result is my novel, Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha.

Set in Guanajuato, the world of my novel enchanted me thoroughly enough to displace the actual city I was living in, especially after we returned to the United States. Certainly the real city and the novel are connected, and I regard the book as a well-researched evocation of the actual place. But Guanajuato, as I had written it, surged vibrantly to life inside me as swiftly as my memory of being there dimmed. I had not seen the city, the ground of these intertwining stories, since the day we left in 2008. But now, driving out of Mexico City with my friend Grant, I was driving back into both the novel and my past.

We had one stop on the way out of town — the Fed-Ex depot in an industrial northern neighborhood of Mexico City where, we were told, Vladimir Verano’s shipment of 70 books awaited us. And, indeed, there it was! A battered heavy box that had seen a lot of road miles, too many of them in DF itself, and was now in our hands, in the van, for the trip to Guanajuato. We drove nearly six hours on pot-holed toll roads, gradually gaining altitude into the Mexican altiplano, talking the entire time about books and friends and the compelling mystery of being North American, what that was and what it could be. Guanajuato emerged suddenly, a city built into the tight confines of three river canyons.

Everything about the city was familiar. The vistas, the air, the light, the crazy noise and boldness of every hectoring voice from the side of every road, men waving brochures and maps at us, two gringos in a van with Washington State plates. The piercing voices of young boys yelling “los mommias!” followed us all the way to the center of the city. We parked the van by the door of La Dama de las Camelias, the arty salsa bar that was our venue, and I loped up the steep callejone to Dean Gazeley’s house. And there I found Dean just where I’d last seen him, three years before, painting an oil portrait in his studio.

Dean is a remarkable oil painter who continues to mine that incredible optical technology for its unique integration of abstraction and figuration. He paints portraits, landscapes, and still lives. There is no illusion in Dean’s painting; there is, first and foremost, the fact of paint in all its richness, organized so that abstraction and figuration collude to make meanings — a face, a field, a posture. His work never collapses into the crude theater of realism, the way that photography does. Oil paint is an organism, a living embodiment of visuality that is becoming more and more relevant as digital technologies reinvigorate the dynamism of visual mediation and remind us of the thin instability of the photograph. Dean is now painting the portraits of leaders of the Mexican senate, an enviable commission that has him in Mexico City much of the time over the next few months.

In his “spare time” Dean arranged every detail of my Guanajuato event, down to picking the wines and the venue. I was happy to find him at home. With Dean’s help we put everything in order, stowing the books at the venue in time for Grant and I to walk to a smokey old cafe called La Carterra, for a half-chicken and some beer. It felt like I had never left the city. And rather than nervousness, this sense of home-coming brought a reassuring surge of pleasure that made the events ahead seem entirely easy.

As in Dallas, the evidence of my pleasure is in the absence of any decent pictures of the event. As soon as we got back to the sunny, high-ceilinged rooms of La Dama de las Camelias and the first friends began walking up the stairs, my mind and heart were entirely caught up in the present. Old friends came, dear friends whom I’d never seen anywhere else but here. Grant kept asking me “is that ‘Kimberly Dwyre?’…is that ‘Carl Silas?’” wondering who in the expat community of this small city had been the models for my main characters. (None of them, honestly. Anyone I know well is too complicated to be useful to me; anyone I don’t know well is of too little interest.) Unexpected friends came. Poet Aaron Shurin, whom I had met in San Francisco in 1990, when my first novel, Landscape: Memory, was published, arrived with the writer Tony Cohan and Karen Adserballe, a Danish writer who also translates the work of Lydia Davis (herself an old friend with whom I taught for several summers at Bard College’s MFA program). The web of connections was vast and surprising.

I drank palomas, a preferred drink of my book’s hero, Carl Silas. The room became crowded. When I stood up to read I chose a section that begins with the bells of the Templo de San Francisco (which were visible out the window, 50 meters away) ringing in the evening. And as I read that “the flat, poorly-forged bells of the Templo de San Francisco clang-clanged into the dusky air, filling this corner of the city with their noisy complaints,” the bells, indeed, clang-clanged, and I stopped reading so that we all listened for a moment to this unusual confluence that can only happen when a writer returns with a certain kind of book to a place that is itself magically like literature. That momentary silence in the airy room with my friends in Guanajuato was as rich and strange as anything I have ever enjoyed in books.

June 24, 2011, Mexico City: I landed in Mexico City with only...

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 11:17:00 -0400

I flew in through clouds to DF.

The highways are crazy.

The computers are state-of-the-art.

Grant Cogswell drinks pulque.

Pulque and books go well together.

Under the Volcano Bookstore, being born.

Sylvain (FR) Matthias (DL) Matthew (US).

The bookstore is on the Cerrada Chiapas.

We ate here, throughout the night.

June 24, 2011, Mexico City: I landed in Mexico City with only two copies of my book. It was a sultry grey, stormy day, and the air was cleaned by rain. Matthias Knecht, a German writer I’d met in Guanajuato, picked me up and we drove DF’s crazy knot of partly built, partly-disassembled highways into the Roma neighborhood for some lunch. Chilaquiles at a nice café, open to the sidewalk; we sat for hours, alternately talking and working, as the sky darkened and thunder rolled.

Ten more books, from Publication Studio in Portland, had made it over the border with Grant Cogswell, my host for that night’s reading at his fledgling English-language bookstore, Under the Volcano Books. But the bulk of our Mexican inventory was missing.

Vladimir Verano, who runs the Espresso Book Machine (EBM) at Seattle’s Third Place Press, came to our rescue with a rush-order of 70 books that he’d put together and shipped the previous week. And now, in the Roma café, came an email from Grant — the books had arrived in DF and Fed-Ex promised to deliver them by 4 pm; my reading was at 7. Oh, and did I mention that Grant’s phone and his apartment buzzer were both broken? Matthias and I got back in the car and started on a round of errands, fetching pulque (the amazing cactus-moonshine that Aztecs developed a thousand years ago), and depositing me and the booze at the bookstore, located in a set of rooms on the first floor of a lovely Art Deco house, where I could rest a little and shower before the event.

In the not-so-distant future, Grant will have the machines we have at PS Portland, or maybe he’ll invest more and have the high-tech EBM that Vladimir runs at Third Place Books. There will be no drama of shipping and Fed-Ex and missed drop-offs. On Grant’s “to-do” list leading up to the event (or the list of any bookseller) will be “get pulque, set up chairs, text invite list, heat up the stew, make books.” But that future is still a little distant, and so, instead of this to-do list, Grant was stuck at his apartment until 6:30 pm, waiting for a Fed-Ex truck that never came. (Look for happy news on this front in tomorrow GTO post.) At 7, he and his housemates showed up at the store, no books in hand, to find me already drinking this incredible peanut pulque, watching the rain, and picking a section of the book to read that night.

We had 12 books to sell and 20 liters of pulque. It was a fantastic event. The storm kept on as the crowd gathered and dispersed, clustering in conversations with me and Grant and each other around the pulque and dispersing for tacos or cigarettes across the street, as the evening grew dark. Around 9:30 pm, half-way through the pulque, Grant gave a formal and inspiring introduction about beginnings. There were a dozen of us in the room. He identified us all as founders of this project, Under the Volcano Books, this place he would focus on the unfolding Americas that mobility and curiosity and new allignments of cross-cultural work had begun to assemble. I was reminded by him of Phil Elverum’s work and the way he brings music to many distant places and brings many distant people to the place he lives and works, Anacortes, WA. Mexico City and Anacortes. That’s the new geography. There are many other places on this map, all of them marked by an ease with scale-shifts and an intimacy that stretches across vast distances and assembles without anxiety.

I read the section of my book where Carl Silas and Luis Madero discuss drugs in a late-night taxi ride into the Sierra de Santa Rosa. Luis is bemused by Carl’s easy self-centeredness and he becomes wistful. Prompted by Carl, he recalls fondly the possibilities he fell into in 1968 when politics and passion aligned in his body and among his friends. As Luis tells Carl, “We could get hard and fuck while polcemen watched, because our minds were clear.”

We sold all the books. Grant drank a lot of pulque. Around one in the morning four of us, plus my luggage and an almost-empty garafon of pulque, flagged down a taxi, a noisy, grinding VW bug that had no front passenger seat. The driver was unconcerned with our number or our bulk. After three of us and the luggage got in the back, Grant tried riding on the garafon where the front seat was missing, and his pain was both comical and affecting. The driver stopped, went to the front trunk and pulled out a small lawn chair that he set up in the passenger spot. Grant, with a disbelieving grin across his face sat there, crowing drunkenly about the incredible city he lives in, for the rest of the way home.

June 23, 2011, Dallas: The pleasures of my Dallas visit are...

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 09:04:00 -0400

That's the Texas flag behind me. Proof!

Poetic instructions on Dallas rail.

And now I'm leaving.

June 23, 2011, Dallas: The pleasures of my Dallas visit are evident in my complete failure to take any pictures or videos. From the moment Susan Briante met me at the Mockingbird Station light rail to the boarding call for my flight to Mexico City, my mind was on everything except documentation. Susan and her husband, Farid Matuk, are poets, and they are raising a singer named Gianna, now 9-months old. In addition to vocalizing, Gianna also swings her legs as a form of applause. Sorry, no pictures!

Farid and Susan organized a dinner party for 7, and our subject was literature, expats, and my novel. Everyone, it turned out, had been an “expat,” often in many different countries and many different ways. Only one was born in Texas, and even he spoke about the “outsider” feeling of a Fort Worth native moving to Dallas. The distance from “home” can be great at even the smallest remove. And the instinct to reform the culture of home (or, in fact, give birth to some third thing, the cloistered group that defines itself by the perceived “strangeness” of what surrounds it) springs up everywhere. If the company had been less compelling or the conversation less interesting, I might have done a better job taking pictures. At 4:30 am I was back on a shuttle to the airport, heading to Mexico City and, I hoped, a fresh box of books.